This article by Kaitlin Bell Barnett is adapted from the new book, “Dosed: The Medication Generation Grows Up,” available April 10 from Basic Books.
I fall hard for coming-of-age stories, and my list of favorite books and movies contains many in this genre, from “Pride and Prejudice” to “The Catcher in the Rye.” The movie “Garden State,” which starred Zach Braff and Natalie Portman, also struck a chord with me when it came out in 2004. It dramatizes a few days in the life of Andrew Largeman, a twenty-six-year-old struggling actor in Los Angeles who returns to his native New Jersey for his mother’s funeral. Andrew is nothing if not alienated: he feels disconnected from celebrity-studded Hollywood as well as from his old hometown, which he hasn’t visited since leaving for boarding school nearly a decade earlier.